Chapter Five

Exercises
Page 191
New Problems:

A. (To be placed after number 1)

Consider a language that has a vocabulary of four letters. How many words of length six
can be formed from this language?

Solution:

Each six-letter word has four choices of letter in each of the six positions. Therefore, the
number of six-letter words is 46 = 4096.

B. (To be placed after number 12)

Consider the definition of prior probability given on page 179 with punctuation removed
and converted to lower case:
“the prior probability generally an unconditioned probability of an
event is the probability assigned based on all knowledge
supporting its occurrence or absence that is the probability of the
event prior to any new evidence the prior probability of an event is
symbolized p(event)”

a. Compute the probability that the word “the” occurs in this paragraph.

b. Compute the probability that you will see the word “an” given that you have
just seen the word “of”.

c. Compute the probability that you will see the bigram “of an” in this paragraph.
(Note: a bigram is two words appearing in the text consecutively.

Solution:

a) The probability of the word “the” is the number of times the word “the” appears,
divided by the total number of words in the paragraph: 5 / 44 = .114.

b) The probability of seeing the word “an” given that you have just seen the word “of” is
the number of occurrences of “of an” divided by the number of occurrences of “of”: 2/3
= .67.

c) The probability of seeing the bigram “of an” is the number of occurrences of “of an”
divided by the total number of bigrams: 2/42 = .048.
Rewritten Problems:

4. How many ways can a committee of four faculty members and three students be
chosen from a group of six faculty members and seven students?

Solution:

6C4 * 7C3 =

11. Suppose that you play the following game. Every time you roll a fair six-sided die
and you get a 6, you pay five dollars. Every time you roll a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 you win one
dollar. Would you have a profit or loss in this game? Explain your answer.

Solution:

You would not have a profit or loss at this game in the long term. You pay five dollars
on every sixth roll, and win one dollar for 5/6 rolls. Thus, for six rolls you would expect
to win five dollars and pay five dollars, which is a net profit of zero.

16. Suppose an automobile insurance company classifies a driver as good, average, or

bad. Of all their insured drivers, 35% are classified as good, 55% are classified as
average and 10% are classified as bad. Suppose that for the coming year, a good driver
has a 7% chance of having an accident, an average driver has a 10% chance of having an
accident, and a bad driver has a 15% chance. If you had an accident in the past year,
what is the probability that you are not an average driver?

Solution:
P(good) = 0.35
P(average) = 0.55
P(bad) = 0.10
P(accident|good) = 0.07
P(accident|average) = 0.10
P(accident|bad) = 0.15

P(average|accident) = P(accident|average)P(average)
--------------------------------------
P(accident)

P(accident) = P(accident|good)P(good) + P(accident|average)P(average) +

P(accident|bad)P(bad)
P(accident) = .07*.35 + .10*.55 + .15*.10 = .02 + .055 + .015 = .09
P(average|accident) = .10*.55 / .09 = .61
P(not average|accident) = 1 – P(average|accident) = 1.0 - .612 = .39
Thus, the probability that you are not an average driver, given that you had an accident, is
0.39.